Event Subscriptions

A fish can accumulate knowledge from many sources.

The state kept within a fish depends on the initial state, the onEvent handler, and of course on the precise events that are fed into that handler. Therefore, defining the set of event subscriptions is fundamental, it belongs with the declaration of a fish; in particular, the subscription set cannot be changed dynamically, as it is so fundamental to the function of the fish.

const mkChatRoomFish = (name: string): Fish<string[], ChatRoomEvent> => ({

fishId: FishId.of('ChatRoom-Example', name, 0),

initialState: [],

onEvent: chatRoomOnEvent,

where: Tag('chatRoom').withId(name),

})

We can use this factory function to create a fish for a specific room: mkChatRoomFish('my-room'). This fish will ask for exactly those events that are tagged with 'chatRoom' & 'chatRoom:my-room'.

We could further refine the query with other tags, for example if we'd like to subscribe to all messages in the broadcast chat room as well. The resulting query:

where: chatRoomTag.withId(name).or(chatRoomTag.withId('broadcast'))

mkChatRoomFish can be called with different fish names. While its onEvent function is always the same, the computed states will differ, because the selected set of events differs. Hence it is also important to generate different FishId: Otherwise the pond might use a cached fish from a different chat room!

If we'd like to get all chat room events, for all rooms, we just omit the call to withId: Tag('chatRoom') alone matches them all. Such a subscription might make sense for keeping track of some property across all rooms, e.g. seeing how often people use swear words in the chat.

With this modification we are ready to see what happens when we run two instances of the chat room fish on different nodes — our first distributed app. Doing so exhibits one of the core features of Actyx Pond: time travel. But before we go there, we take a closer look at the relationship between tags and types.